Jeana Yeager
American aviator
Jeana Lee Yeager (born May 18, 1952) is an American aviator. She co-piloted, along with Dick Rutan, the first non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world in the Rutan Voyager aircraft from December 14 to 23, 1986. The flight took 9 days, 3 minutes, and 44 seconds and covered 24,986 miles (40,211 km), almost doubling the old distance record set by a Boeing B-52 strategic bomber in 1962.
Early life and career
Jeana Lee Yeager was born on May 18, 1952, in Fort Worth, Texas, to Royal Leland "Lee" Yeager (March 12, 1918 – March 17, 2001) and Alice Evaree Snider (née Harris; October 21, 1924 – February 5, 2013). As a child, she and her family variously lived in Garland, Texas, Oxnard, California, and Commerce, Texas. Following graduation from high school, Yeager, at age 19, married a police officer; they divorced five years later. She then worked as a draftsman and surveyor for a geothermal energy company in Santa Rosa, California. In 1978, Yeager obtained her private pilot's license while still living in Santa Rosa.
Yeager worked for Robert Truax while he was developing a reusable spacecraft. She met Dick Rutan in 1980 and they soon both set distance records in the Rutan VariEze and Long-EZ planes, designed by Dick's brother Burt Rutan.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jeana Yeager” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.